Catholic Answers Focus: Is Francis a bad Pope?

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Yeah, it’s getting pretty insane. I can look at this website less and less.
 
OKComputer said:
I can’t help but think that the Catholics who critique Francis are sort of like those guys who are convinced that they could coach in the NFL even though they’ve never left the couch.
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Yes, I call those guys “Armchair Popes”.

Most of them couldn’t even get themselves to seminary…
 
Year ago I remember george cloney telling a critic that since the critic had never made a movie he wasnt qualified to say if the movie was good or bad.

I remember thinking there are lots of things I cant do, lot of meals I can not cook, that doesnt mean I cant tell if they taste good or bad.
 
If you look at it through less hostile eyes you can see the significance of the pagan ritual that recognized a communion between the living and the dead that is what the Christian Communion of Saints recognizes. So instead of interpreting the move as ‘getting ride of pagan holiday’, the Church was giving that holiday a relevant Christian meaning. Why does there always have to be and angry aggressive spin on this topic? Catholics have always found the traces of godliness in pre Christian spirituality especially the Irish and other indigenous faithful. To deny that was a very protestant attitude.
 
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Are you Catholic? I guess I should have asked before posting my initial reply.
 
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I think they might read the forums but will not reply. If I remember correctly a prior host did read the forums and sometimes commented but rarely. Your best bet is to call in when it’s an Open Forum show.
 
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Tis_Bearself said:
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phil19034:
and this time, they are not even trying to pretend it’s the Blessed Mother!
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I should think that would be a good thing.
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Of course… but it just proves that those statues were Pachamama the whole time and not the Blessed Mother like some were trying to claim.
 
Motherwit said:
If you look at it through less hostile eyes you can see the significance of the pagan ritual that recognized a communion between the living and the dead that is what the Christian Communion of Saints recognizes. So instead of interpreting the move as ‘getting ride of pagan holiday’, the Church was giving that holiday a relevant Christian meaning. Why does there always have to be and angry aggressive spin on this topic? Catholics have always found the traces of godliness in pre Christian spirituality especially the Irish and other indigenous faithful. To deny that was a very protestant attitude.
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Pagan holidays and/or some pagan rituals can be incorporated into the Church, if there isn’t anything demonic about them. That’s not a problem.

The problem is that Pachamama is a pagan goddess. The original priests who arrived as missionaries to the natives of the Americas and baptized the people pushed for the people to totally abandon the native gods & goddesses.

In all honesty, this whole Pachamama obsession would be akin to Greek Catholics (or Greek Orthodox) using statues/icons of Gaea (the Greek goddess of earth) as part of their prayer life.

Or if Catholics in Rome were using statues of Tellus, the Roman goddess of earth.

If it’s wrong for Catholics in Greece and Italy to invoke Gaea and Tellus, then it’s equally wrong for Catholics to invoke Pachamama
 
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ThomasMT said:
their concern with the open embrace of modernism.
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I’m having trouble parsing “open embrace,” kind of like an open clasp or an open hug, but okay, I’ll assume, provisionally, that it’s their concern about modernism.
 
It is hard to deny that St. Paul directly tied pagan worship to God.

I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.

He then went on to proclaim that God, is this unknown God, this source of pagan worship. He set the template for the Church of starting with the ignorance of paganism and extrapolating that which is true from that which they had. More to the point, he acknowledged that God have forbearance with those in "times of ignorance. We should not be so narrow as to think of this as an actual calendar time. Priests who work with the Amazonian people are dealing with people who are even more primitive than the ones St. Paul preached to in Athens.

FYI, I took the advice of someone and listened to the pod cast above. I think the main point of the CA program has been missed. The question they were addressing was not whether Francis is a bad pope, but the more general issue of what to do if there is a bad pope. If one can understand the hypothetical, the issue of trying to judge the current pontiff becomes moot, allowing God to have his throne back.
 
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Is Pope Francis a bad Pope? We cannot judge his heart, his intentions or his state of mind. But objectively, his Pontificate has seen many blunders, with the Pachamama incident, the ongoing corruption scandal involving the Vatican Bank and the disastrous “Provisional Agreement” with the Chinese Communist Regime being the worst examples. I think Catholics should be able to discuss a Pope’s record of governance of the Church openly and respectfully. After all, not every Pope we had was good, and many of them serve as cautionary tales.

The Papacy is a very important office in the Church that demands our filial respect. But the Pope is the Vicar (representative) of Christ, whose job is to pass on the faith as it was ahnded to him byus his successors. not an Oracle who is infallible in things beyond the definition of Infallibility as defined by the first Vatican Council. (In fact, I don’t even think Francis considers himself as an Oracle, and this whole myth was invented by Massimo Faggioli and Austen Ivereigh, who have done more th hurt the Pope’s image than all the “Rad Trads” combined).

I woud finish by this quote from Frank Sheed:

"“We are not baptized into the hierarchy; do not receive the Cardinals sacramentally; will not spend an eternity in the beatific vision of the pope. Christ is the point. I, myself, admire the present pope (he was referring to John Paul II), but even if I criticised him as harshly as some do, even if his successor proved to be as bad as some of those who have gone before, even if I find the church, as I have to live with it, a pain in the neck, I should still say that nothing that a pope (or a priest) could do or say would make me wish to leave the church, although I might well wish that they would leave.”
 
Dadrocks said:
The laity has the responsibility, if not an obligation to (as a work of mercy) to call out that poor behavior and leadership by the prime minister of the faith. In this “Time of the Laity”, we can not be called to stand by quietly without endangering our souls by the good we fail to do.
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I’m going to pop this out because I think it is a distortion of the laity’s general responsibilities.
99.9% of the laity have neither the competence or the sphere of productive responsibility to criticise the Pope.
If you don’t have those, then your criticism can be an exercise in arrogant curiositas, and that leads to no one’s holiness. Most of us (me included) could benefit from minding our own business and helping the people right in front of us to holiness. That’s fruitful for the kingdom. Raise faithful children, help your spouse get to heaven.
 
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